Soil Conservation and Environmental Management: Lessons from the Kyoto Protocol

ISCO 2004 - 13th International Soil Conservation Organisation Conference – Brisbane, July 2004 Conserving Soil and Water for Society: Sharing Solutions SOIL CONSERVATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT: LESSONS FROM THE KYOTO PROTOCOL Julian Dumanski, Consultant in Sustainable Land Management, Ottawa, Canada Abstract The increasing emphasis on environmental quality creates a window of opportunity for soil conservation and for the world’s farmers. Carbon (C) sequestration is the permanent and semi-permanent C locked up in soil or plant materials. Current estimates are that C sequestration can mitigate about 10 - 20% of global atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) accumulation. Countries that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol have already assumed obligations to reduce their contribution of GHGs to the atmosphere, including C, and many more will have to do so in the future. It is unlikely that these obligations can be met without the benefit of soil C sequestration. Currently, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) and the Kyoto Protocol are the only international environmental conventions which potentially provide financial benefits to farmers for environmental services, but many of the lessons learned in the evolution of the UNFCCC can also be usefully applied in the Convention on Biodiversity, the Convention to Combat Desertification, and the various agreements on international waters. Additional Key Words: carbon sequestration, soil conservation, environmental conventions Introduction There is increasing evidence (World Bank, 1997) that under improved systems of land management, involving soil conservation and related technologies, agriculture can be both economically rewarding and provide environmental benefits to society, i.e. agriculture could be a major partner in the environmental solution. Well designed, farmer- centered, sustainable land management (SLM) interventions have distinct advantages as vehicles for pursuit of joint agriculture-environment objectives. The pillars of SLM are the application of agroecological principles to farming; an emphasis on human resource development and knowledge based management techniques; a participatory and decentralized approach; the value placed on natural and social capital enhancements in addition to economic efficiency gains, and the role of strong and self reliant rural institutions. Land management decisions by individual farmers have implications for many environmental goods and services, such as impacting on habitats for fauna and flora, on a variety of ecological services, and on amenity or aesthetic values. The impacts may arise directly on land managed for agriculture and livestock, or indirectly as a consequence of fragmentation and degradation of natural (less managed) habitats such as forests and wetlands. However, capturing agricultural and environmental benefits is difficult under current economic systems, which are designed primarily for trading in commodities as private goods, and which are increasingly influenced by negotiations involving globalization and trade. Unfortunately, these negotiations make only marginal (effective) reference to environmental concerns and other public goods and services. Therefore, some new financial protocols are required that better internalize environmental costs with economic benefits. Currently this is being explored using a market based approach, but this is a new and unexplored area for environmental management, and it often requires deeper blending of science and business management than has been the case to now. This requires the development of new financial instruments, such as environmental credits, the exploration of how to value the environmental outcomes, development of procedures for monitoring with acceptable transaction costs, and the evolution of national and international trading institutions, which in most cases, can be put into place only through cooperation among local, national, hemispheric, and global institutions.. The evolution of such market based incentive mechanisms is taking place under negotiations for the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto protocol. These negotiations, as well as those under other international environmental conventions, open opportunities to better promote soil conservation. However, this requires that the soil conservation community become better informed, more proactive, and more actively involved in the discussions involving the negotiations. This paper identifies some evolving opportunities under the Kyoto Protocol, and it is argued that similar opportunities will become available under the other conventions in the future. Paper No. 133 page 1 ISCO 2004 - 13th International Soil Conservation Organisation Conference – Brisbane, July 2004 Conserving Soil and Water for Society: Sharing Solutions Opportunities to Promote Soil Conservation – Examples From The Climate Change Convention Although all environmental international conventions deal with land management in some way or other, it’s only the UNFCCC which currently provides direct opportunities and financing mechanisms from which farmers can draw benefits, and which can promote soil conservation. This is being explored through the flexibility mechanisms, e.g Joint Implementation (JI), Clean Development Mechanism (CDM, being negotiated under the Kyoto protocol, and the evolution of the international market to promote trading of carbon credits. The Kyoto Protocol and Soil Conservation: The objective of the Kyoto Protocol is to stabilize and reduce GHG emissions, mitigate climate change, and promote sustainable development. The Protocol is historic in that it is the first attempt to achieve international agreements to mitigate global climate change through reduction in GHGs, and the first to employ the flexibility of the global market for global environmental management. The Kyoto Protocol recognizes the overwhelming importance of controlling and reducing GHG emissions (sources), primarily from industrial and transportation sources, but it also recognizes the corresponding opportunities to be gained through better management of carbon reservoirs and enhancement of carbon sinks (sequestration) in forestry and agriculture. The latter are achieved through soil conservation, improved local land management practices, such as crop rotations and zero tillage, and management of land use change (conversions). Through these mechanisms, the Kyoto Protocol is emerging as an important and effective opportunity for promoting soil conservation. Experience has shown that structuring the international agreements such that global emitters can pay for some of the accrued environmental benefits, as is done for SO2 emission reductions under the Great Lakes environmental agreement, is an important mechanism for both delivery and sustainability of the actions. The Kyoto protocol emerged first as a framework agreement, but through international negotiations it is progressing into sets of legal articles. These impose obligations on all signatories, but they also identify opportunities for improved environmental land management at local, national and international levels. This is particularly true for soil conservation, where the sequestration of carbon above and below ground increases soil organic matter, enhances soil fertility, and improves production, while concomitantly reducing atmospheric CO2. The Protocol provides us with an opportunity to promote local, national and global soil conservation, and develop networks and partnerships for this purpose. It is a classic “win-win” situation. Global Potentials for Carbon Sequestration: Soil C sequestration and soil conservation are important mechanisms in mitigation of climate change through reduction of atmospheric CO2. Atmospheric concentrations of GHGs have increased significantly since the beginning of the industrial revolution. To the middle of the 20th century, land conversions from grasslands and forests to agriculture, and poor land management practices, have been the major contributors. Since then, burning fossil fuels (industry and transportation) and cement manufacturing have become the main causes. However, agriculture and land use change still contribute about 20% of the anthropogenic emissions (IPCC, 2001). Also, tropical deforestation continues to contribute about 1.1 – 2.1 Gt C yr-1 to the atmosphere (IPCC, 2000), and the process is accentuated by soil erosion and other degradation processes. The global potential for C sequestration is considerable. For example, the potential for US cropland is approximately 75 – 208 Mt C yr -1 , China is approximately 105 – 198 Mt C yr-1, the EU is approximately about 45 Mt C yr-1, Canada is approximately 24 Mt C yr-1, and India is 39 – 49 Mt C yr-1. This is about 8 % of annual emissions due to fossil fuel burning in the US and up to about 45 % of fossil fuel emissions in India (Lal et al., 1998; Lal, 2003; Smith, 2003; CFI, 2002). In addition, recent evidence from the humid tropics indicates that tropical regions have considerable potential for C sequestration. For example, C accumulation rates in tropical agroforestry systems range from 4 - 9 t C ha-1 yr-1, and over a normal rotation of 20 – 25 years, above ground C accumulations in plant biomass can be as high as 50 t C ha-1, and C accumulations in the soil can be as high as 5 – 15 t C ha-1 (Palm et al., 2000). Studies on the potential under irrigation indicate that if irrigated agriculture could be expanded 10%, and an equivalent amount of rain-fed land

Load more